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The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that authorship of a Dead Sea Scroll, written 2,000 years ago by the formidable Teacher of Righteousness, is to be shared, in its modern rendering, by a mild- mannered scholar from Ben-Gurion University.
The court upheld a 1992 ruling by then-Jerusalem District Court Judge Dalia Dorner that Prof. Elisha Qimron, in reconstructing the text of a scroll known as MMT, had acquired copyright to the document because of the extensive scholarship he applied to filling in gaps amounting to 40 percent of the fragmented text.
Qimron had sued American publisher Hershel Shanks for infringement of copyright after the latter printed Qimron's reconstruction of MMT in a book without permission and without crediting Qimron.
Shanks, who publishes the popular Biblical Archaeology Review in Washington, argued in district court that copyright belonged to the writer of the ancient text, not to the scholar who deciphered it. Judge Dorner found for Qimron and awarded him the unusually large sum of NIS 100,000 for damages and mental anguish. She also ordered Shanks to pay NIS 50,000 towards court costs...